The Holy Father’s lately-issued Encyclical with its clear statement of the doctrine of the unity of the Church based upon the primacy of jurisdiction of the See of Peter, comes as an opportune commentary upon the Report of the Malines Conversations now at last published. The plan of these Conversations was to proceed by way of affirmation—to bring forward the points upon which agreement could be reached and to shelve, at any rate for the time being, the attempt to come to any conclusions upon questions where there was likelihood of radical disagreement. As the Report proceeds we become increasingly conscious of the presence of a fundamental difference of outlook underlying such agreement as was reached. To the Anglican representatives the unity of the Body of Christ’ is something desirable but unattained ; to the Catholics it is an existing fact and a necessary presupposition. This is the crux of the whole question. The corporate union of the Church of England with the Holy See, the ultimate object envisaged by the Conversations, were it ever to come about, would not be the re-joining of two separated parts of the Body of Christ, it would be the uniting of a schismatic member to the one and indivisible Body.

Robert Keable’s death requires a remembrance in Blackfriars, where almost first of anywhere, the writings of the new Keable found place. It was at the time of the founding of Blackfriars that he came in contact with those who were busy with its beginnings. He welcomed it, and was always its friend.

The friendship began in this way. His book, Standing-by, had been given me, and had captivated me, being, so I thought at the time, so I still think, the most admirable study of the War from the standpoint of religion, with its insistence on the two types of Christianity, Catholic and the Y.M.C.A., that is, the priestly religion, authoritative and sacramental, and the religion of clubs, libraries, gramophones, and cups of tea. Under the spell of the book, I wrote to thank the author in a letter of gratitude, addressed to him care of his publishers. For a couple of months I heard nothing. When I had forgotten all about my letter, written, it must be confessed, under the first emotion of the book’s beautiful style and exquisite language and delicate austerity of idea, I was pleasantly reminded of it by a very long answer, full of personal explanation and dated from Basutoland, whither Robert Keable had returned with his labour battalion when the War was done. In that letter one phrase of it may bear quotation: ‘Please pray, that I who have had the light to see the Vision may have the courage to follow it.’

The event in which Araunah’s threshing-floor figures is narrated in II Samuel xxiv, and again in I Chronicles xxi. We are there told that, because David had numbered his subjects, ‘the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel and there died of the people from Dan even unto Beersheba seventy thousand men.’ But when the destroying angel had begun to strike Jerusalem, David saw him, and he humbled himself and confessed his sin. And ‘the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people: It is enough; stay now thine hand. And the angel of the Lord was standing by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebu-site .... And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him : Go up, rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite.’ So David went up and asked Araunah, who happened to be there threshing, to sell him the threshing-floor so that he might build there an altar to the Lord. Like a true Oriental Araunah begs David to take not only the floor, but also the oxen he was threshing with for the burnt sacrifice and his threshing-drag for wood; he makes him a present of them all. But David knew what he was meant to understand, and paid Araunah the full value. ‘So David bought the threshing-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.’ (I Samuel xxiv, 15-25).

‘Mr. Browning, the poet of incomprehensible mannerism, the taste for whose writing in England is probably to be explained in the same way as the popularity of double acrostics . . . . lives for society, and in society. If he can not be at the homes of the great, he is satisfied to be seen at the establishments of the small .... He is an agreeable man, full of anecdote accommodated to his audience, profound or superficial, light or serious, scientific, poetic, historical, or what you will. He is more than a septuagenarian: yet he enjoys the mild distractions of the most common-place drawing-rooms with the unsophisticated freshness of early youth. He has the vanity as characteristic as irritability itself, of the race of bards. His venerable fascinations are, as he piques himself on believing, irresistible by ladies of all ages and all degrees. He does not trumpet forth his conquests to miscellaneous assemblages, but he is fond of telling the favoured fair of his achievements among their number. Mr. Browning is a professional diner-out, and has not yet satiated his appetite for evening parties. If peers and peeresses, plutocrats of high degree, and others well placed in the London world, do not happen to invite him, he condescends to shine in the firmaments of society’s minor queens. The region in which he thus, finds himself is, to the social student, the most curious imaginable. Poets, painters and players, publicists, critics and essayists abound. The women are mostly the wives of professional men, not a few of them lion-hunters by calling ....

I have just been reading an extremely interesting book by Dr. McNair Wilson, called Napoleon the Man. The book gives a picture of Napoleon which, the author claims in his preface, has never before been given in the English language. The claim is, I fancy, a just one; although, if he had written his book in French, it would have been hardly possible for him to establish so large a title to originality. For the thesis which Dr. Wilson urges upon us as a new and hitherto concealed truth is very much the thesis which M. Coquelle, in his book, Napoleon l’ Angleterre, sets out to refute as the conventional academic interpretation of Napoleon’s character.

However, be that as it may. Dr. Wilson has many very interesting and very provocative things to say, any one of which might be made the subject of an essay. Briefly, his thesis is that Napoleon was the hero of peace and democracy who gave to the world a new gospel. This gospel was temporarily defeated at Waterloo, but it was not then killed. It was the gospel for which England and France fought together during the years 1914-1918 and which eventually triumphed at Versailles.

It is one of the happier signs of the times that we have advanced so far on the road of reform in our liturgical music that the Bishops can now order (what, in the past, they could only recommend) that, whenever the priest sings his peculiar part of the Mass, the choir should sing theirs. Yet, on account of certain fixed ideas, the new regulation is more honoured in the breach than the observance. One is that the Kyriale must always be sung to some harmonised setting taken from Cary’s or Fischer’s catalogue. No parochial body but a select choir can sing such a composition and therefore the peculiar business of the choir is the Kyriale. This duty they have always carried out to the best of their ability; but as it exhausts all their energies, any additional work must be ignored as a counsel of perfection. It takes time to absorb such a revolutionary idea as that the Kyriale, which the choir have only recently usurped, is the canonical right of the people; and that the Proper, which the choir have systematically neglected, is their only raison d’être.

Another fixed idea is that the Proper of Mass, like that of Vespers, if sung at all, must be sung to the official chant. The choir know nothing of this ancient idiom and there’s an end on’t. Now Catholic choristers are sensible men and women, quite as ready as other parochial workers to do the right thing when they know it.

From several books which have been published in the past few years, it has become possible to understand more clearly one of the most remarkable mysteries in the history of Irish political agitation. The full truth will probably never be known, though it concerns the whole subsequent development of Irish history. To any student of politics, the growth of the Sinn Fein agitation must always be a fascinating and perplexing problem. And the more recent books which have thrown light on the matter have made no attempt to deny that Sinn Fein, as a policy, and still more as a violent agitation, was not only unpopular, but was actually hated by the mass of the people in Ireland at the time when the organisers of the Dublin rising of Easter week, 1916, carried out their carefully arranged plans, which were intended to take the country by storm. Mr. P. S. O’Hegarty, whose Victory of Sinn Fein was the first complete revelation published by one of the chief organisers of the secret society which launched the Dublin rising, quite openly glories in the claim that the leaders of the rising had acted in a way which the people as a whole disapproved.